Steve Lacy

Saxophonist, born in New York City, USA. He studied music at Boston and Manhattan before concentrating entirely on the soprano saxophone, becoming a sideman of some the best soloists during the 1950s. He travelled the world, spending 30 years in Paris, and drew influences from poetry, dance and various aspects of foreign cultures. In 1960 he recorded with Thelonius Monk, and Soprano Today (1957) was the first of several recordings dedicated to Monk's work. He recorded over 200 albums, regarding his improvisational opera The Cry (1999) as his greatest work. In 2002 he returned to the US to teach at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Steve Lacy (July 23, 1934 – June 4, 2004), born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York, was an innovative jazz soprano saxophonist.

Lacy began his career working with dixieland music with masters such as Henry "Red" Allen, George "Pops" Foster and Zutty Singleton and then with Kansas City jazz players like Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, and Jimmy Rushing before jumping into the heart of the avant-garde by performing on the debut album of Cecil Taylor, and making a notable appearance on an early Gil Evans album. Monk tunes became a permanent part of his repertoire, making an appearance in virtually every concert appearance and on albums. He also became a highly distinctive composer with a signature simplicity of style: a Lacy composition often is built out of little more than a single questioning phrase, repeated several times. In the 1960s he also became deeply involved in the American free-jazz avant-garde and, in the 1970s, the European free improvisation scene: free improvisation became another important element in his musical personality.

Lacy's first visit to Europe came in 1965, with a visit to Copenhagen in the company of Kenny Drew; He became a widely respected figure on the European jazz scene, though (perhaps because he was living abroad, perhaps because of the demanding purity of his style) remained somewhat underrated in the U.S. except among his avid fans, who became used to tracking down Lacy's prolific output on a variety of imported European labels.

In the 1980s the core of Lacy's activities for much of his Parisian period was his sextet: his wife, singer/cellist Irene Aebi, soprano/alto saxophonist Steve Potts, pianist Bobby Few, bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel, and drummer Oliver Johnson (later John Betsch). Lacy also, beginning in the 1970s, became a specialist in solo saxophone, an innovator who ranks with Anthony Braxton and Evan Parker in the development of this demanding form of improvisation.

Lacy was interested in all the arts: the visual arts and poetry in particular became important sources for him (he frequently made musical settings of his favourite writers: Robert Creeley, Tom Raworth, Brion Gysin and other Beat writers, haiku, Herman Melville...).

Lacy returned to the United States in 2002, where he began teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.

Diagnosed with cancer in August 2003, he continued playing and teaching until weeks before his death at the age of 69.